Free The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World by Roger Kahn Page A

remembers who, told Hyland of the strike plan. Hyland sought out Terry Moore, the St. Louis captain, called “the greatest center fielder I ever saw” by Joe DiMaggio. Moore was thirty-five years old, approaching the end of an outstanding career.
    Hyland told Moore that he had heard about the strike and that the players ought to be pretty damn careful. He wasn’t saying anybody had to like “nigras.” He just wanted to tell them they were heading for trouble.
    Moore is hazy about his end of the conversation. (I found him in Collinsville, in southern Illinois, on a simmering summer day made lively by the wails of a tornado warning siren. Moore was seventy-nine and undergoing treatment for prostate cancer. He recalled Doc Hyland speaking to him “about the Robinson thing” forty-four years before; he said he was not sure what he told Hyland.)
    The conspiring ballplayers recognized that secrecy was essential. They believed wildly that a surprise strike, bringing baseball to a stop one day in May, would drive the nigger from the game before his supporters could counterattack. The press, which, as I say, had not been notably friendly to Robinson, was nonetheless an enemy of secrecy. The conspiring players agreed no words, no hints, no nothin’ to the sportswriters.
    Once two people know a secret, as the saying is, it ceases to be a secret. Dr. Hyland felt honor bound to report what he knew to his employer, flinty old Sam Breadon, who was now planning to sell the Cardinals to secure himself a pecunious, quiet old age. Breadon was no social activist, but as a businessman he recognized that the strike could tear down the value of his franchise. Who wanted to buy into the Civil War? Breadon flew to New York. There, as he later said, “I talked things over with some of the men” at the New Yorker hotel. He heard enough to fill him with dread. He took a taxi to the Rockefeller Center building that housed the office of Ford C. Frick, the president of the National League.
    Frick listened thoughtfully, heavily. He was not a confrontational man, nor even, over the years, a very strong one. But Breadon’s report stirred Frick as nothing in baseball ever had or would again. He proceeded to Ebbets Field at once — it was early in the afternoon of May 6 — and commandeered a small office high up, behind home plate, adjacent to the press room and the bar, where some hours later sportswriters would be drinking free whiskey, supplied by the teetotaling Branch Rickey. The office was secure because no sportswriter would be coming to work at Ebbets Field for several hours.
    Frick called up seven Cardinals, individually. He did not want to address a group. He would divide the strikers before conquering them. Musial was not summoned.*
    The message Frick delivered to each player was unyielding. It went like this:
    If you strike, you will be suspended from the league. You will find the friends you think you have in the press box will not support you. You will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended. I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another. . . . You will find if you go through with your intention that you will have been guilty of complete madness.
    And there amid shafts of spring sunlight the strike withered. Was there ever a more glorious moment in sport?
    A version of these events reached the ubiquitous Dr. Robert Hyland. Among the surgeon’s avocations was singing in a barbershop quartet. Good whiskey and nighttime crooning pleased the soul. One good friend, with whom Hyland sang, was a Canadian native named Cecil Rutherford Rennie, who wrote baseball for the
Herald Tribune
under the name of Rud Rennie.
    By the time I came to know Rennie, in 1953, he had suffered a heart attack and had covered too many ballgames. He was noted then for the speed